Just click on the “More” icon next to the reply, retweet and favorite buttons in order to email a Tweet to anyone you know. You can add your own comment, and we’ll send an email with your comment and the Tweet together. Just like that.

Was it really THAT HARD to copy and paste a tweet into email? If only there was a way for me to share messages word for word with the people who choose to receive my messages!

Let’s review the benefits of this “update.”

What does this update do for people already on Twitter? Nothing.

What does this update do for people who might want to join Twitter? Nothing.

Who wants to join a social network just to send more email? No one.

Twitter – understand your own social network. Stop adding useless bloat features. Focus on making Twitter so amazingly easy to use that nobody will send an email ever again.

In my day job, I work to ensure that people don’t make themselves look like asses online. So when I see two “social media rockstar ninjas” duking it out publicly on Twitter, I raise a virtual eyebrow.

Everyone loves to watch a disaster when it doesn’t affect them, but Twitter isn’t the proper place to have a fight. Twitter is the absolute worst place to fight about anything.

When you argue on Twitter, you limit yourself to the lowest level of argument. You can’t expand your thoughts. You can’t use any detailed examples. You’re fighting with whole world watching, and your fight is probably over something that could be solved with a two minute phone call.

It has even less substance than a presidential debate.

And for what? To prove a point that doesn’t need to be proven? To try and make yourself look smarter than someone else people only know through 140 character messages?

Those goals are really going to advance your crappy personal brand into the toilet, right next the rest of your mouth diarrhea.

Get over yourself. You have a right to defend your reputation, but you’re going to look like an ass trying to make a point on Twitter where people don’t have context and form their on misinformed opinions and assumptions.

Be the better person. Don’t get into a fight over nothing. Take it to somewhere you can have a real conversation. Somewhere you’re not trying to drag someone else through the slings and arrows of the social media peanut gallery.

In fact, we all make mistakes when we write. It’s a fact of life. Everyone doesn’t have a proofer checking things behind them to make everything they write perfect.

So when you see a blog post (or a tweet, or a Facebook post or whatever) with a grammar mistake, don’t be an asshole and publicly post to the author “UR DOIN IT WRONG.”

That just makes the author feel bad and makes you look like an ass-hat.

Take the ten seconds it takes to send a private message to the author with the mistake. Chances are the author will fix it as soon as he or she can, and they won’t feel like they’ve been put in the stockades for a misplaced keystroke.

And then the internet will be nicer, if only for the briefest of moments.

Apparently they made that Twitter thing with some other guy. And before that, they had something to do with blogging. Good for them.

However, they got sick of Twitter and left. I like to imagine they left because people started spending too much time using it to bitch about crappy customer service at McDonald’s instead of sharing useful information.

So while they were in seclusion, they went ahead and made a new digital publishing thing called Medium. Apparently, we really needed one more third-party owned network to publish our deepest thoughts and desires.

But what the hell is Medium?

Right now, none of us have a true idea what Medium is. While many people have signed up, it hasn’t been opened up widely yet. The few examples that have been shared combine collections of writing or images. Nothing that hasn’t been done before.

But, I think there are more than enough clues as to what it really is.

Consider that media is the plural of medium. Right now, digital publishing is best suited in one medium at a time.

We blog one post at a time to express ideas.

We share photos in albums.

We post videos to YouTube.

See what I’m getting at? The individual medium is not connected into a cohesive format. Digital publishing, which has the ability to combine these formats into a cohesive model, has yet to do so.

The media has not become a medium. We’ve failed at creating cohesive digital formats.

Dont believe me? Look at a Twitter picture. The picture isn’t tied into the message. It’s a separate link. Is this really the optimal way to share information in an age when a phone can do more than some laptops?

The way I see it right now, Medium looks to correct that by building a platforms that successfully combines different types of media. This brings out a whole host of ideas about how we consume and create content.

So, is Medium the future of digital publishing? Will it change how we read, write, and absorb information? I don’t know yet. But I think they’re on to something that hasn’t been fully thought out yet by us mere mortals.

Developers have a lot to be angry about. They were the ones who made the first apps for Twitter. They were the ones who made up the @ reply, hashtags, and retweets. They developed software to put Twitter on your desktop and smartphone. Hell, they even came up with the idea to use a blue bird as the Twitter logo.

In short, a lot of what we know about Twitter today is because independent developers took the time to create it based on the first version on Twitter’s API. And now, Twitter is blowing it up in their face.

Arguably, most of this is occurring because Twitter is transforming from a venture capitalist-funded social network into a media corporation supported by advertising revenues. Twitter is slowly rolling out features such as “Twitter cards” to deeply integrate rich media into the code of tweets themselves. This integration creates a more dynamic experience while also giving advertisers better ways to reach users than with a 140 character messages.

Unfortunately, what’s good for the business isn’t necessarily good for the developers. Developers are migrating to App.net, a subscription based carbon copy of Twitter. That means all the smart, passionate people who care about doing cool thing with Twitter are moving away. While I am doubtful about the mass adoption of a somewhat elitist subscription based social network, the migration is an indicator of a larger trend.

We’re in the middle of the biggest shake up since the current crop of social networks began. Just like how social media professionals can’t talk about rainbows and puppies and engagement as business goals, the social networks themselves must prove their ability to make money.

And they’re floundering miserably at creating the massive revenues investors were hoping for.

In response, the once pristine newsfeeds are becoming cluttered with ads. More and more of our friends profiles are becoming electronic billboards with more stuff to click.

Is this the future of social media, where the social network becomes the media corporation, focused on creating a consistent experience to deliver ad units? I’m not sure. But, I do think we’re going to be seeing this shake out over the next few years, finding out what people are willing to pay for access to their social network.

Somewhere out there, some nerd, scorned by the mainstream social networks, is looking at these models and working on a better way to make these social network things both efficient and profitable.

As a social media professional, and a young one at that, I think it’s important for me to share my overwrought and extremely important opinion without having read either source article.

How on earth should you, a marketing or corporate communications professional, know what the right age is to hire? How are you going to know who the right person is to manage your social media channels? If you don’t know their age, how can you decide if they’re the right person?

What’s even worse? As the hiring manager, you can’t ask someone their age here in the US. So how are you going to know who’s old enough and young enough to manage social media properties?

The answer is simple. There is no one old enough and young enough to manage your social media properties.

If you need to hire social media professional today the better answer is to not hire a social media professional. You will never find someone eho is simultaneously old enough and young enough with the perfect skill set to be your social media manager.

I know how hard it is to accept that. Once you learn that no one can manage your social media appropriately you’ll learn that it’s better to live your business life without social media.

Still, if we as social media bloggers focus on the age of social media managers, we will never discuss the real things that matter to social media professionals and the businesses they work for. Things that matter, such as measurement and enterprise social media scaling. Things that could get you hired, like real and demonstrable skills. Or things that change the very nature of our work, like the convergence of social messaging and social advertising into paid, owned, and earned media.

But that shit is boring and doesn’t get page views.

So fine. Let’s just focus on age of social media managers. We don’t want to get anywhere productive in our social media conversations. Who seriously wants to discuss what the right skill set is for an entry-level social media position?

And if you’re going to seriously discuss that, I’m going to need a drink.

I trained for a half marathon, which meant time spent blogging was spent running and praying I don’t die of exhaustion.

Blogging doesn’t pay my bills.

I decided it was more important to have a life with real meaning off the internet, rather than waste my life on the screen.

But here I am, back for more. I guess you can say that I’m a glutton for punishment.

There have also been a number of topics that have been bugging me. Social media bloggers have been arguing back and forth about meaningless topics that have no value. We’ve stepped away from critical analysis of the tools and how people and businesses use them. Instead, I see pointless bickering, opinions offered as facts, and critical thinking sacrificed in favor of bite-sized information crammed into poorly designed infographics.

Ugh.

Someone needs to elevate the conversation. And for fuck’s sake I guess it’s going to be me.

So, this week I’ll be blogging about age, the future of social media, Twitter, and lurking. Maybe I’ll throw in a post about cats too, or what diarrhea can teach you about Pinterest marketing strategies.